Chevron Locked for the Ladies: Stargate's First All-Women Convention Just Got Its Second Guest

20 days ago by Eli Gatewood 4 min read

For the first time in nearly three decades of Stargate conventions, somebody's throwing one dedicated entirely to the franchise's women. Amanda Tapping headlines, Teryl Rothery just signed on as guest number two, and it's happening in Australia this November.

Indeed. Stargate has never lacked for reunion tours, cast panels, and "one more chevron" nostalgia events — but somehow, in nearly thirty years of Gatecons and cruises and convention-circuit stops, nobody had ever built one that put the franchise's women at the center of the marquee instead of the side panel. That changes this November.

Return to the Gate – Queens of the Chevron, the Hub Productions' seventh Stargate event, is billing itself exactly as advertised: "For the first time ever, we shine the spotlight entirely on the incredible, ground-breaking women who shaped the Stargate universe." Amanda Tapping — Lt. Col./Brig. Gen. Samantha Carter across Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and a Universe cameo — headlines. And this week the second guest locked in: Teryl Rothery, who spent seven seasons as Dr. Janet Fraiser, the SGC's chief medical officer, before the show wrote one of its quietest gut-punches by killing her off mid-battle in "Heroes."

That pairing is not a small thing if you actually sat with SG-1 for ten years. Carter was the show's answer to "can a hard-science astrophysicist run a Y-shaped wormhole through a military bureaucracy and still out-think everyone in the room" — and the answer, for a decade, was yes, without the writers ever treating it as a stunt. Fraiser was the opposite kind of groundbreaking: not the one leading the away team, but the one every single member of SG-1 owed their life to at least once, running the infirmary as the actual moral center of Stargate Command. Losing her in "Heroes" (S7E17–18) is still one of the only Stargate deaths that lands like a real death instead of a plot device, and a convention built around her and Carter sharing a stage is the kind of pairing the franchise never quite got around to giving either of them individually.

Logistics, because this is where fan-event announcements always get slippery: the event runs as two separate stops, Sydney and Melbourne, with day, VIP, and Platinum ticket tiers — day passes start at $160, VIP (with an intimate additional panel) runs $800, and Platinum, which adds a meet-and-greet evening with the guests, tops out at $1,350. Here's the part worth double-checking before anyone books a flight: the event was first announced back in late July for October 3 (Sydney) and October 4 (Melbourne), but the Hub Productions' own live ticketing pages now list November 21 (Sydney) and November 22 (Melbourne) — a real date shift, not a typo, since it shows up consistently on the current booking pages while older announcement copy still floats around citing October. Chevron's encoded; just confirm it's still locked before you buy.

The timing of an event like this is almost funny, in the way Stargate's last year keeps being funny in a slightly cursed way. Amazon MGM torched Martin Gero's revival back in June, Richard Dean Anderson called the whole thing a "dead issue" from a convention stage in August, and the closest thing to forward motion since then has been Amazon quietly fielding writers for some other version nobody's seen yet. None of that has anything to do with whether Amanda Tapping and Teryl Rothery sell out a ballroom in Sydney. The convention circuit has been the one part of this franchise that never needed a network's permission to keep going, and "Queens of the Chevron" is the circuit deciding, on its own schedule, that Carter and Fraiser earned a night that's actually about them.

No word yet on whether more guests join before November — the Hub's past events have had a habit of adding names as tickets move — but even at two, this is already the most pointed convention lineup Stargate's fandom has gotten in years. Unscheduled offworld activation, ladies. Glad someone finally dialed it in on purpose.


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